During the decades they spent holidaying in Morocco, Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé became captivated by the culture of the native Berber, or Amazigh, tribe, which has inhabited North Africa for 9,000 years. The extensive collection of Berber art and artifacts the couple acquired from the ’60s until Saint Laurent’s death in 2008 is now housed at the Musée Berbère at the duo’s Jardin Majorelle studio villa in Marrakesh. Beginning Friday, the pieces will appear for the first time in the West — alongside a trove of art and objects from private collectors and the Musée du Quai Branly — in the show “Berber Women of Morocco” at Paris’s Fondation Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent. More than 600 intricately detailed decorative objects, including headpieces, jewelry, carpets, textiles, furniture, pottery and one spectacular set of handcarved kohl eyeliner pots, will share space with drawings by the French artist Titouan Lamazou and archival photographs of Berber women sporting the tribe’s traditional dress. Those familiar with YSL’s oeuvre will no doubt spot the influence on the designer’s work. But what’s especially uncanny is how on-point the women’s look — layers, volume, insouciant accessorizing — feels today.
Bergé asked the show’s curators to focus on women because of their pivotal contributions to the community: traditionally “feminine” crafts and adornment, and the female job of harvesting argan oil, have ensured Berber economic survival, while their role as educators has preserved the tribe’s ancient language. But women are also at the heart of the exhibition, said Bergé in a statement, simply “because most of the objects concern them.”
“Berber Women of Morocco” is on view until July 20 at Fondation Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent, 3 rue Léonce Reynaud, 75116 Paris; fondation-pb-ysl.net
An earlier version of this post misstated the artist Titouan Lamazou's age and nationality. He was born in 1955 in Morocco but is French, not Moroccan.
